If I had been a betting man yesterday I would have lost everything including my shirt. I did not believe for one minute that the weather would clear enough to allow us to launch. But about an hour before the scheduled liftoff time the weather did indeed clear enough for NASA to proceed with the final launch in the Shuttle program.

could see her very well, no RSS in the way and was visible till she broke through the cloud deck, and was even visible further through some breaks in the clouds south of the pad. Took what are pretty good photos in my view but not professional quality that are on NASAspaceflight.com's L2 section.

We do sort of...that will be Orion's MPCV (Multi Purpose Crew Vehilce). If you have never seen it it resemmbles the old Apollo Spacecraft only on Steroids. Orion has the capability to carry a maximum crew of 6 down to a minimum crew of 4. All we need now is a heavylift vehicle to get it where we want it to go...the Moon, Astroid Belt, Mars....etc.

Hey Per, I was really lucky to get the one I did. I was not really paying to much attention to my camera settings and CF card space. I thought we were really going to scrub on Friday. So I was suprised and delighted that we launched until I started to fire off shots only to find I was at the end of my free space on my CF card. Grand total of 4, count em, 4 shots and most of those while Atlantis was still hidden by the FSS/RSS.

the 1st launch - probably even more emotion ??? Very specific remembering of it: driving on a highway (in Europe) everybody was listening to the countdown live in the radio - and almost all drivers were slowing down to 30Mph or less, just caught by the tension of that moment....

Actually I was in the middle of trying solve an event problem involving some of the Nasa launch guest viewing sites there at KSC. I had just enough time to squeeze off a couple of images before I had to get back to the mission support work at hand.